Ron Carlson is the author of five story collections and four novels, most recently The Signal. His fiction has appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, Playboy, GQ, Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He is the director of the writing program at the University of California at Irvine.
"A love story and a wilderness adventure that mount to a climax of
shocking, and satisfying, violence."
— Los Angeles Times
"Carlson never drops an extra word or a false phrase, even as The
Signal accelerates like an avalanche...If men can't be brought back
to fiction by books as fine as this one, it's their own damn
fault."
— The Washington Post
"Powerful...a bittersweet love story and a rousing adventure."
— The Miami Herald
"Read Ron Carlson's latest, The Signal, and you'll be convinced
that the answer to your worries resides in the woods, in getting
back to basics....It's a sweet, tidy little book about a broken
rancher. And yet it won't just help you pass the time, it will help
you out." — Esquire
"Long revered as a master of the short story, Carlson has a talent
for describing landscape (both internal and external), and that
translates here intact. At fewer than two hundred pages, it's beach
ready, too."
— GQ
"Ron Carlson is probably the best American writer you've never
heard of."
— The Daily Beast
"Uncommonly fine...Carlson's writing is crisp and blunt, much like
the very Wyoming landscape he describes. The Signal is about small,
tight things that widen out into immensities. it is about love and
regret and the pain of loss and the wild parts of Wyoming." —
Chicago Tribune
Praise for Five Skies:
"A life-changing work of fiction."
— Los Angeles Times
"Carlson's style--low-key, deliberate, reminiscient of both early
Hemingway and contemporay James Salter...can turn even a shopping
list into a poem."
— The Washington Post
"A masterpiece."
— The Atlantic
"Ron Carlson's beautifully crafted and emotionally wrenching novel
about nonverbal but deep-feeling males in flyover country is more
refreshing than an ice-cold Coors." — Entertainment Weekly
Praise for Return to Oakpine
“Carlson’s new novel, with its themes of male friendship and second
chances, hoes much the same furrow as his lovely previous books
Five Skies and The Signal… Carlson’s crafted an emotive yet
pellucid prose style that conveys the profound spiritual
satisfactions of homecoming.”—The Wall Street Journal
“As stirring and memorable and utterly rejuvenating a novel as
you’ll read…Carlson infuses these pages with such conviction, such
perfectly orchestrated pathos…the book is as lean and structured as
a sonnet, and it has a split-focus climax as sharp as an ax.”—The
Washington Post
“In this new book of his, Ron Carlson has done a splendid job of
making a reader feel at home in Oakpine…Carlson can sometime sound
the music of the entire novel in a single sentence.”—Alan Cheuse,
“All Things Considered,” National Public Radio
“Engaging…These men and their tender, disgruntled families get
almost enough to sustain them, but not quite enough to calm the
inner cry. These characters will stay with you because this
is how we are too.”—The New York Times Book Review
“[An] eloquent and moving novel…the tension that drives Return to
Oakpine [is] between what we want to do and what we need to do,
between our dreams and our responsibilities.”—Los Angeles Times
“In this novel by an American master, four middle-aged friends,
once members of the same high school band, reunite in their Wyoming
hometown thirty years later, reconciling the people they’ve become
with the kids they used to be.”—O, The Oprah Magazine
“Carlson excels in small-town Western Americana, in both embracing
and interrogating nostalgia in quiet, controlled prose…a humane
portrait of the lives we lead and leave behind, peeling back
nostalgia’s gold veneer with grace, empathy, and a pragmatic sense
of optimism.”—Kansas City Star
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